I'm not sure if this is specifically a Fedora 6 problem, but I keep banging my head at it: apache, mediawiki.
I ran into a bunch of problems when I decided to convert a larger document I'm working on (text book like writing with lots of math) into the wiki media format, so I can make it later public.
I thought it would be easy to set things up, after reading in the O'Reilly book on Fedora linux (mainly fedora 6) by Chris Tyler about setting up apache and mediawiki. It was fairly easy to get apache to work as a start, but then I seem to be unable to do anything with it. In particular for the mediawiki part:
Fedora 6 installs it in /var/www/mediawiki. It is then, if apache is running, available as
http://localserver/mediawiki.
However, there is no way to get to configure it, which should be done following the link on the start page for mediawiki.
Even after following meticulously the steps outlined in the book on apache, I can't access anything in the mediawiki diretory via http. Now I have a few suspicions:
First of all, it is noticable that there are more config files in the whole apache bag than one can usually handle. So, to
start, there is a directory /etc/httpd/conf and a directory /etc/httpd/conf.d, and there seem to be two similar but not equal configuration files, namely
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and
/etc/httpd/conf.d/system-config-httpd.conf
It appears that the latter, system-config-httpd.conf is used and modified by the gui accessible via
system->administration->server-settings->httpd
Using that gui, I made the directory /var/www/mediawiki accessible via http; I can access it using firefox, which I could before I even used the gui, but can not follow the links on the mediawiki startup window, which i also couldn't do before using the gui.
The first question is, should I just forget about the GUI and do the setup by hand in the
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file? - And is it the right file to modify?
The second question is then, why are there two different files? And what do they have to do with each other? Is some of this stuff simply broken? The file system->administration->server-settings->httpd looks particularly messy, with many large chunks of blank lines.
The third question would be, why is everything sooooo complicated? If I was setting up a real webserver (this is only for my LAN, and in fact for now just one or two PCs), I might have nightmares about not having located and secured the last config file. I suspect the biggest security threat to computers is the inflation of configuration files, containing ever more jargon and heaps of options, plus a big toolbox full of half working setup-wizards. --- OK, I stop whining now.